"And we go backwards? And I can't," she gasped.
Then followed a deadly battle with the conductor, compared with which the skirmish in the Douane ranked as a polite difference of opinion. Gallantly facing this awful gold-braided personage, who at first was to busy to be spoken to, and, on the advice of her fellow victim, bombarding him with reproaches in such scattered remnants of French as an extreme effort of will could summon from the recesses of an exhausted brain, and vainly looking meanwhile in every direction for the civil and paternal Cooks' Interpreter of advertisements and letters, Ermengarde told how she had booked through the perfidious Cook a seat facing the engine, and could not by any means travel in any other way and must have another carriage. A civil flow of idiomatic provincial French, upon which the words Marseilles and Paris floated at intervals, in reply, conveyed nothing but distraction to her mind. Finally she demanded an exchange of seats with some traveller who liked going backwards, in three separate languages, and heard in two that madame had better monter vite, as the train was off.
During this engagement she was much annoyed by the efforts of a man in a furred coat, of whose observation she had been indignantly conscious before, to divert the official's attention to himself, in which he at last succeeded by some mystic sign (probably Masonic) conveyed by a touch of the hand in which something glittered in the sunshine. At this juncture the other lady appeared on the car steps, and drawing her inside, explained that it would be all right if she would only wait till the people were settled in the now moving train, and found her a slip seat in the corridor, with which the hapless Ermengarde was obliged to content herself, facing forward, and cherishing deep resentment against the man in the fur collar, whose mysterious and insistent gaze from behind coloured spectacles had continually followed her since her arrival at the train. She felt that in some vague way her misfortunes were owing to this creature's malevolence.
"He looks like an Anarchist or a Nihilist," she confided to the lady. "He's a Russian; these great hairy men always are—unless they are Jews or both."
"Are all Russians Nihilists and Anarchists?" the lady asked.
"Always, when they get out of Russia, unless they are diplomatists. He was hiding a box under his coat. Filled with dynamite, no doubt."
"To blow us all up? Oh! I don't think we are worth that. No celebrities on board to-day. Are you going all the way to the Riviera? You look so tired. Recovering from influenza? So tedious. Pray let me help you all I can."
In spite of her civility there was something repellant to Ermengarde in this young woman, a preoccupation, a reticence, that she mistrusted. Surely that voice was familiar, and the face too; she must have met her, though quite at a loss to say where or when. But at her question on this point there was a brief negative and a sudden retreat from the first cold, calculated approach to friendliness. The face became an utter blank, and vanished behind a periodical.
The train flew; the hairy-faced Nihilist had ended his discussion with the conductor, and was standing in the corridor by a window, surveying the flying landscape and plunged in meditations, dark and evil, no doubt, and probably hatching villainous schemes for the destruction of society. People went up and down the corridor, brushing and stumbling over her skirts, mistaking their compartments, and alternately losing and finding, after much tumult, friends, bags, caps, smoking and restaurant cars. And this was to last all the way to Paris.
The man of mystery might as well let off his infernal machine at once, and have done with it; the slip-seat was narrow, the train rocked as it flew, and Ermengarde, aching wherever it is possible for humanity to ache, felt as if she was breaking in halves at the waist. But what was her surprise and pleasure in the misery of this dark moment to hear a respectful voice at her ear requesting madame to be kind enough to take possession of a forward compartment to Paris in the next carriage, and to find herself at last, as if by enchantment, in the identical state-room of her dreams and the International Sleeping Car Company's pictured advertisement, with its private dressing-room, its airy space, its slip-seat under the window—"should the passenger desire to change position"—and, better still, the whole compartment to herself, but jusqu' à Paris only. What bliss to sink upon the deep, springy seat, to cast aside heavy coat, furs, and hat; and close tired eyes for a moment, and then open them and see the flying foreign landscape, chill, bleak, powdered with snow, and bounded by sea, as they drew near Boulogne!